Almost everyone in higher education understands that a new wave is crashing on our shores... to use the metaphor in my article of that title (post number two of this blog).
Harvard Business School's Clay Christensen, the king of the "disruption" theory, sees the internet as the core technology that enables low-priced competitors to enter the higher ed market and topple the traditional players. But Christensen's disruption theory has come under fire from competent critics in recent times.
What looks most likely to me as this juncture is that:
1. We will see more restructuring and recombination of institutions than we will see actual closings. Witness the aborted attempt of Sweet Briar College to close last year. This announcement by the trustees created an uproar. Eventually even the Virginia Attorney General and the state's Supreme Court got into the act of keeping the college operating. Lesson: we can't quit, even if we want to.
2. Bachelor's degrees increasingly will be cobbled together from combinations of community college credits, AP credits, online classes, life-experience credits, and other sources. Students will come to four-year institutions with 50% or more of the credits they need. We here at the four-year schools will take them in, round out their educations and give them diplomas.
3. As the high school diploma was replaced by the bachelor's degree as the "basic" educational credential of the average working stiff, who hoped to earn a decent living, during the past half century or so, the professional master's degree is replacing the BA as the ante needed to play in the increasingly competitive game of professional life in a global arena.
Dean Ortiz is not alone in trying to take this evolving concept of higher education to the next level. "Her venture is not the only effort to create a new kind of college — there’s the Minerva Project, created by a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco, and MOOC providers like Udacity, started by a former Stanford University professor.
"But those are for-profit businesses. Ms. Ortiz says she plans to create a nonprofit institution so that 'all of the revenue can be reinvested in the enterprise to serve the public.'
The plan is to begin with a campus in the Boston area that she hopes will grow to about 10,000 students and 1,000 faculty members — about the size of MIT. And her long-term plan is to add more campuses in other cities as well."
It will take some time for all of this to play out. Speaking personally now, my wish is to hang onto my brains and brawn long enough to play a role in this exciting revolution. The fourth great wave began about the time I was born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was marked by the explosion of the megaversities and the infusion of National Defense Loans and other federal investments in higher ed. Today''s fifth wave is characterized by a much more eclectic set of causes and effects. Clark Kerr, builder of the Cal State system, is often credited with coining the term "megaversity" and correctly charted the fourth wave's path. I don't think Christensen or anyone else as yet has accurately charted the path and impact of the fifth wave, even though it is breaking upon us as I write this.
But isn't it exciting to be a part, or even just a witness, of it?
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